Resources - Geek Speak - Pachyderm Project

Welcome to Geek Speak, a column designed to keep cultural institutions in the know on the latest technologies. The tech world moves at a dizzying pace and we hope to make it a little clearer for those in the museum world. We will review hardware and software, make the business and technology of web pages a little clearer and hopefully make the internet a more interesting place for you to roam. If you have suggestions for future topics, please email them to zeroone@zeroonedesign.com

Taking Teaching by the Tusks:
The Pachyderm Project

Imagine, if you will, a world where those who "know stuff" in a Museum or Gallery are able to put together a compelling and interactive multi-media product with very little support from I.T. departments and programmers. That would be a pretty powerful ability, wouldn’t it? The New Media Consortium, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and more than a dozen universities and museums throughout North America have gotten the ball rolling with a project they call Pachyderm. (http://www.nmc.org/pachyderm/)

With Pachyderm, curators, educators and other "knowledge holders" have a tool to develop interactive multimedia presentations, virtual exhibits, kiosks, cd roms and other modules by uploading media files to a server, filling out simple web forms, and clicking a "publish" button.

Currently in beta testing, Pachyderm 2.0 is an open source framework that "makes the publication of modular and updateable rich media an easy task". Sounds good, but what does it mean? Let’s look at it piece by piece.

First the whole project is open source (it is being distributed under the Apache license). This means, most importantly to the museum community, that it is free. Yes, completely free. Open source software (OSS) has been around for quite a while, but has recently gotten onto the radar of the average user with projects like the Firefox web browser.

OSS also provides the user with the source code for the application. While this won’t mean much to the average, non-technical user, it means that additional modules, modifications and changes can be made and shared by a larger community. If someone wants to create a Quicktime VR plugin for Pachyderm, for example, they will be able to, and could then share their work with the rest of the community. (For more information on Open Source, visit http://www.opensource.org)

Secondly, Pachyderm allows the publication of modular and updateable rich media. When a Pachyderm project is put together, the user can choose which screens they want to use from a dozen preset templates. The templates include a zoom screen, a slider screen, a timeline screen, and others. Each of these screens can be populated with photos, sound, video and other "rich media". And each of the screens is published from forms; if you want to change content on one of the screens, simply change the fields on the form and republish.

Lastly, publishing to Pachyderm will be "an easy task". Well, everything is relative, isn't it. Putting together a project in Pachyderm is more difficult than creating a Power Point presentation, but significantly easier than hand coding an html document, and drastically simpler than programming the Flash that would be necessary to replicate the user experience offered. With enough planning and a little bit of hand holding, anyone can produce an interesting project.

And these projects are interesting. Not just static pages with the occasional image, Pachyderm projects can be animated, with soundtracks, slider bars, hot spots, videos and more. The development team has also adhered to technical standards; the information used to populate the templates is provided in XML, creates SCORM 2.0 compliant learning objects, and can embed Dublin Core metadata.

Pachyderm version 1 was developed as an in house tool at SFMOMA, and examples of projects developed with it are available at http://www.sfmoma.org/education/edu_online.html.

Version 2 is currently in beta testing with a public release planned for fall 2005.

Jonathan Lathigee (jonathan@zeroonedesign.com) is a geek, a partner in Victoria-based internet development company Zero One Design Inc. (www.zeroonedesign.com), and the I.T. Administrator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (aggv.bc.ca)